Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

Friday Fun, Songs from Before My Birth, #9

It's not exactly top-shelf analysis to point out that the Beatles were pretty great. Music writer Chuck Klosterman once put together a list of the "properly rated" bands, and said this: "[t]he Beatles are generally seen as the single most important rock band of all time, because they wrote all the best songs. Since both of these facts are true, the Beatles are rated properly." That's pretty much the most succinct explanation of the Beatles and why they are important.

There are at least a dozen Beatles songs that I could have picked ("Norwegian Wood," "In My Life," "I've Just Seen a Face," "Yesterday," "Across the Universe," "Revolution," and "We Can Work It Out" deserve consideration). I went with this song, because I believe it is the best written song of all time. "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" has only 113 words, and 28 of those words are the chorus repeated four times. So, absent the chorus, John Lennon has 85 words to tell his story. In those 85 words, he describes the feeling of not being able to move on from a failed relationship. The other person is fine, but you are a mess, and it seems like everyone know it.

In 85 words, John Lennon captures that experience perfectly, to the point where you think he is narrating an experience that you have had. As a technical matter, it is an amazing achievement to communicate this in so few words--it's not like the song is talking about a particularly simple or uncomplicated experience. And yet the song nails it, perfectly. It's amazing. That's why the Beatles are the best.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Less than a month ago, I said I would stop talking about Roman Catholicism, and I had every intention of sticking to that. But I am going to break that promise to talk about the release of the report of the Royal Commission in Australia about clerical sexual abuse. The results are shocking--if the reports are correct, the scope of the problem in Australia was even worse than in the United States or in the UK/Ireland. To give an example, there was a reference to a Benedictine monastery in Western Australia in which 17.6% of the monks had an abuse allegation lodged against them at some point in the 1950s. Think about being in a room with a group of monks in which one out of every six of them had someone in the 1950s accuse them of committing a sexual violation on a minor. Think of how many complaints were not made in the culture of the 1950s. One in six. My God.

I had a twitter exchange last night with Maureen Clarke about the report, focusing on what is the obvious question--how…

In the previous post, I framed question #2 of "how did this sex abuse crisis happen?" as "how did it come to pass that the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church covered up the fact that some number of Roman Catholic priests had and were sexually abusing children, either actively or passively, thus facilitating the abuse?" The answer to that question, in my view can be answered in a one sentence response--"because the culture of the Roman Catholic priesthood is sick and broken, and the sex abuse crisis is the most visible manifestation of that pathology."

It is extremely important here to emphasize the word "culture." While people contribute to cultures in which they are a part, a culture is a conceptually distinct entity from any particular member of that culture. There are deeply decent and honorable men who are Roman Catholic priests. But the culture in which they swim is not decent and not honorable in the main. And, in what is perhap…

Summing up what was included in the last three posts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), I would say that the Roman Catholic clerical sex abuse crisis was caused by:a completely closed and insular clerical culturewhich prioritized its own autonomy from judgment by non-clerical institutions, andwhich developed a culture of "don't ask, don't tell" with regard to sexual indiscretionsformed in light of its own internal struggles around the fact that a majority of its members were closeted gay men, andwhich was also struggling with shrinking numbers, thuswas incentivized toward doing whatever possible to keep priests in the fold and on duty, whilelacking robust tools to recognize the true harm and danger of the sexual abuse of children.
In light of this diagnosis, what can be done to rectify it? One thing that will certainly not rectify it is creating a culture of paranoia around homosexuality inside the priesthood. And yet, that seems to be what has happened, and in many respect…